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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "adapting"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Fri, 5 Feb 2016 09:27:00 PSTDavid Bowie's Legacy On Copyright And The Future Of MusicMike Godwin and Zach Graveshttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160204/17585333527/david-bowies-legacy-copyright-future-music.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160204/17585333527/david-bowies-legacy-copyright-future-music.shtml
Amid the steady stream of "hot takes" the past few weeks on the legacy of the late great David Bowie, The Washington Post's Robert Gebelhoff dug up some of the rock legend's contrarian views on copyright, if only to rebuke them thoroughly.

Gebelhoff's piece cited a 2002 interview Bowie gave to The New York Times in which he prophesied: "I'm fully confident that copyright...will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing…It's terribly exciting."

Exciting though it may have been, Bowie's prediction obviously has not come to pass, for which Gebelhoff says we should be thankful. In his piece, he notes that strong copyright laws "play an essential role in our creative economy – and have done so for centuries." He cites as evidence a recent Stanford University/NBER study on how differing laws in Italian city-states led to more operas being produced where copyright was protected.

Bowie has long been an innovator and music visionary, experimenting with early ways to use the Internet to "cybercast" concerts and connect with fans. But it's important that Bowie wasn't necessarily seeking the death of copyright (after all, he used it to make a living). Instead, he was paying heed to what digital media already had done to revolutionize copyright-centered industries.

What he got right was detecting traditional copyright industry's anxiety – the same anxiety that has led them to push successfully for copyright terms to be extended by nearly 580 percent over the last 200 years. Mickey Mouse famously has enjoyed several retroactive copyright term extensions since Walt Disney's death, though Walt has yet to take advantage of this added incentive.

So why would Bowie, whose fortune and fame owed so much to the music industry, be excited about the end of copyright? The answer is straightforward: as a working, successful musician and producer, he knew as well as anyone that unlimited copyright protection could hinder creation, as well as remunerate it. If you're a fan of Bowie's "Young Americans," you know that part of its power as a song derives directly from its unembarrassed quotation of the Beatles song "A Day in the Life."

While copyright didn't disappear in the decade since Bowie's interview, Bowie was in many ways right about the impending shakeup of the industry. More and more consumers, particularly millennials, are listening to their music on demand through a streaming subscription, rather than purchasing copies a la carte. Remix has become a central technique for new creativity. And heavy-handed copyright can get in its way. Look, for instance, at what future presidential candidate Kanye West did with Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman." Bowie's vision that "music itself is going to become like running water or electricity" turned out to be pretty accurate.

This trend has led to sharply declining revenues from physical sales (except for vinyl, which is doing fine, thanks to hipsters) and a steadily increasing share for streaming. Digital downloads are still popular and continue to represent a major revenue source for now. As physical formats have fallen out of favor, as Bowie perhaps foresaw, the industry experienced a period of sharp disruption.

The result has been not just depressed global revenues, but also a whole apparatus of production, distribution and retail falling away. As a 2015 study by Midia observed, the narrative of "music industry decline is a label phenomenon." Which echoes what Bowie saw coming in 2002: "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way."

Of course, the role of our copyright system is not to protect established industries from disruption. Policymakers shouldn't protect the record store from Apple or the bookstore from Amazon. Our nation's founders gave Congress a mandate to use copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is, to provide the carrot to spur artistic creation. If we take copyright "incentives" too far, they can undermine artistic freedom by imposing limits on other forms of creative expression and uses of tangible property.

Even the opera study Gebelhoff cites in his piece acknowledges this, as its authors write that "there is no clear evidence" that copyright extension beyond the author's life span creates meaningful incentives. In fact, they suggest it has little effect "beyond the first five years." In an article about the study, New York University law professor Christopher Jon Sprigman notes that: "[this] conclusion is particularly important because our contemporary debate is usually not whether to have copyright at all, but rather whether to extend already very long copyright terms."

Bowie was wrong that copyright would end, but he was right that copyright as we know it is under threat. Its foundation, built for an analog age, increasingly struggles to function in the digital one. And its market, warped by decades of heavy-handed government intervention and industry carve-outs, doesn't know how to operate freely anymore.

That's why substantial reforms will be inevitable. As Congress slowly moves in that direction, it should be mindful of this lesson: stronger copyright laws don't automatically incentivize more creative freedom. In fact, they often come at its expense.

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]]>exciting-times,-if-you're-looking-forward,-rather-than-backhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160204/17585333527Mon, 31 Aug 2015 12:45:00 PDTMoral Panics And How 'The Kids These Days' Adapt: From Facebook 'Permanence' To Snapchat's 'Impermanence'Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150826/17101432074/moral-panics-how-kids-these-days-adapt-facebook-permanence-to-snapchats-impermanence.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150826/17101432074/moral-panics-how-kids-these-days-adapt-facebook-permanence-to-snapchats-impermanence.shtmlwrote about an old moral panic in the NY Times from 1878 about two Thomas Edison inventions, the phonograph and the aerophone (basically a broadcasting system for the phonograph). It's somewhat hilarious to read these days:

Recently he invented the phone- graph, a machine that catches the lightest whisper of conversation and stores it up, so that at any future time it can be brought out, to the confusion of the original speaker. This machine will eventually destroy all confidence between man and man, and render more dangerous than ever woman's want of confidence in woman. No man can feel sure that wherever he may be there is not a concealed phonograph remorseless gathering up his remarks and ready to reproduce them at some future date. Who will be willing, even in the bosom of his family, to express any but most innocuous and colorless views and what woman when calling on a female friend, and waiting for the latter to make her appearance in the drawing-room, will dare to express her opinion of the wretched taste displayed in the furniture, or the hideous appearance of the family photographs ? In the days of persecution and it was said, though with poetical exaggeration, that the walls had ears.

Thanks to Mr. Edison's perverted ingenuity, this has not only become a literal truth, but every shelf, closet, or floor may now have its concealed phonographic ears. No young man will venture to carry on a private conversation with a young lady, lest he should be filling a secret phonograph with evidence that, in a breach of promise suit, would secure an immediate verdict against him, and our very small-boys will fear to express themselves with childish freedom, lest the phonograph should report them as having used the name of "gosh," or as having to "bust the snoot" of the long-suffering governess.

Beware! And, just a few days ago, someone on Twitter (I fear I can't find the tweet now) pointed me to this story from last year in the Atlantic, highlighting a similar moral panic in the NY Times, twenty years earlier, about this horrible device known as the telegraph. You see, it spreads information so quickly, we'll barely have time to think:

"Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?"

And, of course, things are little different today when it comes to new technologies. In fact, you could take the quotes above from the 19th Century NY Times and with very few changes, likely have them apply to modern internet services and social media -- and they would be little different from some of the stories that you do see in the press today.

And, just as was true of those two stories above, it turns out that the fearmongering is way off base, and the ability of people to adapt and change grows. Take the fears over Facebook, for example. Just five years ago, in 2010, the NY Times Magazine warned us all about the perils of the internet remembering everything we've ever done, and how you'll never be able to rid yourself of such a "permanent record." It discusses previous moral panics about the privacy impacts of certain technologies, but then pulls out the "but this time, it's different" card.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

The author, Jeffrey Rosen, declares this a "collective identity crisis":

As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public and accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends with the Facebook partner sites you visit.

There are plenty more stories like this. Stories about how difficult it will be for the "Facebook generation" to run for office, given that all their childish antics will be online. Or stories about how people are living too much through their Facebook feeds, rather than just experiencing life.

And yet... people have a way of adapting. Venture capitalist Adam Besvinick, recently noticed that, in talking to recent college grads, they actually were having the opposite experience of what everyone was fretting about just a few years ago. And that's because they all started using Snapchat rather than Facebook for such things:

Interesting recurring sentiment from recent grads: We lived most of our college lives on Snapchat—now we don't have any "tangible" memories.

He later notes that some of those grads are now regretting that they don't have much tangible to hold onto about those memories. And, yes, as I'm sure someone is rushing to point out in the comments, Snapchat's "disappearing" images and videos don't really disappear, and they can (and often are) saved. But many are not. And they go away. And, yes, that's kind of like things were in the past, when people just experienced things, rather than share them all.

But it's important to note that everything adapts. Kids adapt. New services adapt. Societal norms and culture adapt. And things don't turn into some dystopian nightmare that some worry about.

So many people look at these new services and react with outrage because they're different, and because they're different and will create different kinds of experiences, they must be bad. But history has shown that people are pretty damn resilient, and are pretty good at figuring out how to do things in a way that best suits them. And some will fail. And some will make mistakes. But it's hardly a crisis deserving of a moral panic. These things seem to take care of themselves pretty well -- and then people start worrying about the opposite (e.g. not enough permanence) as compared to the original moral panic (e.g. too much permanence).

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]]>things-change,-people-adapthttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20150826/17101432074Tue, 18 Aug 2015 03:06:00 PDTHollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records... While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing MoviesMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150817/11485931984/hollywood-keeps-breaking-box-office-records-while-still-insisting-that-internet-is-killing-movies.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150817/11485931984/hollywood-keeps-breaking-box-office-records-while-still-insisting-that-internet-is-killing-movies.shtmlbroken a new record in bringing in $2 billion in box office revenue faster than any other studio in history, pushed over the top by the successful opening weekend of "Straight Outta Compton" (a movie that seems to have some big fans in Silicon Valley).

Thanks to the overperformance of N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” Universal Pictures is tracking to cross the $2 billion mark at the domestic box office on Saturday, setting a new speed record in doing so.

Universal’s historic climb will break Warner Bros.’ previous record of reaching $2 billion by December 25, 2009. The studio is also extremely likely to break the record for all-time domestic box office high, which was set by WB in 2009 with $2.1 billion.

That does not sound like an industry that is having a problem getting people into the theaters, even if the movies are available via infringement. But, people will argue, these services are actually harming the "home video" revenue stream. But that's questionable as well. First off, it was Hollywood that angrily fought against ever allowing a home video market in the first place (remember that?). And, more to the point, we've seen over and over again that when the industry actually adapts and offers content in a reasonable format at a reasonable fee, people will pay at home, just like they do in theaters.

But, of course, due to continued Hollywood confusion and jealousy, it's still holding back lots of movies from Netflix streaming -- one successful service that has shown that it's totally possible to "compete" with infringing content.

So, again, it's confusing as to what Hollywood's real complaint is. It's shown that if it makes good films, people will go out to the theaters to see them, rather than just watch them online. And if it offers them in a reasonable manner for a reasonable price online, people will pay for that as well. And yet, it doesn't do a very good job of this and then blames the internet for its own failures to adapt. Seems like a weird strategy. If I were an investor in those companies, I'd wonder why they've spent the better part of two decades so focused on "stopping piracy" rather than doing a better job delivering what the public wants.

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]]>because-if-the-story-sounds-good,-why-bother-with-the-factshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20150817/11485931984Fri, 16 Nov 2012 08:33:56 PSTDoug Stanhope: Piracy Is A Problem Only If You Think Of It As A ProblemTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121109/13433320998/doug-stanhope-piracy-is-problem-only-if-you-think-it-as-problem.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121109/13433320998/doug-stanhope-piracy-is-problem-only-if-you-think-it-as-problem.shtmlmore open, it's worth noting that comedians have long existed on the edge of the IP world. While some comedians will occasionally pull out the copyright card, accusations of joke-stealing and copyright infringement of their acts haven't found the same hold as in music and movies. There is a great deal of borrowing and tweaking going on in the joke world and yet the comedy business is still around.

The internet has done nothing but good for comedy all around. Comedians no longer have to rely on TV execs and club owners deciding if they are funny or not. There’s the problem of piracy if you think it’s a problem. I credit piracy with getting my name known enough to have a decent career. People bootlegging shows on cellphones and putting material out before it’s finished is a problem for every comic, but compared to all the upsides of what the internet has done, it’s a fact of life that we’ll learn to adapt to even if it means finding these people and killing their families in front of them.

Now, I'm at least 75% certain that the last bit about killing families for infringement is a joke, but his larger point is a gem. When we, all of us, think about what we want the internet to be, it is important for us to weigh the sum total of its impact. If I may extrapolate on Stanhope's statement, I would argue that this completely undermines the view the piracy and/or sharing must be stamped out on simple moral grounds. We've all heard the "but piracy is just wrong!" arguments (or, heard that in substitute of an actual argument) but that's nonsense. Piracy, infringment, and sharing would be wrong if there were a net-negative impact on the works being infringed upon or shared. If there is a net-benefit to those people, as Stanhope suggests there indeed is, how in the hell could that be morally wrong?

Further on that point, while some may argue that it is still wrong because the infringers are not respecting the wishes of the artist, look at how Stanhope frames it: Piracy is a problem if the artist thinks it's a problem. Bootlegged shows and uploads may present challenges and problems, but they are going to adapt. It seems to me that it is every bit incumbent upon artists, be they comedians or musicians, to change their frame of reference as it is on the internets denizens to respect the artist's wishes.

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]]>frame of mindhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121109/13433320998Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:33:00 PDTKorean Music Industry Embraces The Future While US Counterparts Fight ItMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/00360120743/korean-music-industry-embraces-future-while-us-counterparts-fight-it.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/00360120743/korean-music-industry-embraces-future-while-us-counterparts-fight-it.shtmlis taking over the world, using (obviously) Gangnam Style as exhibit number one. Of course, you could argue that one faddish song is not proof that they're taking over the industry, so there's a bit of journalistic hyperbole at work here -- but the larger point comes clear in the podcast: the US's music industry was built for the 20th century -- a world of scarcity, limited distribution channels, hyperfocus on music and a strong reliance on copyright -- but the Korean pop music landscape is focused on a much more 21st century strategy.

They focus on "industrializing" the production of music, with hit factories and star making academies. They focus on a multimedia experience. Korean pop music is released on TV. New debuts are released on TV with a video... and, of course, via YouTube. And that's the third point: Korea is incredibly wired. It was the first country with 3G networks in place and one of the first to have super high bandwidth broadband widely available. The end result? The industry, mostly built up in the past two decades, is built for the modern digital world, while the US industry still pines for the way things used to be. And that has some people worrying that, like many other products that the US used to lead in only to see foreign countries take them over, Korea might supplant the US in cultural exports over time. I still think there's a long, long way to go before that happens, but it is a scenario worth considering. It is still held back somewhat by the language barriers, but that's hardly a complete game stopper.

Of course, we've written about this before. Nearly four years ago, I wrote about seeing Korean music mogul JY Park speak about the K-Pop industry, of which he's a leading player. The points he made back then fit nicely with what Planet Money's report noted, but take it even further. One point he made was that the K-Pop world really took off as an industry once broadband became common. I'm reaching back 4 years into my memory banks, but I'm pretty sure he said the tipping point was when 70% of the country had high speed broadband connections. At that point, the business of just selling music was no longer the real business he was in. Instead, it was all about building up multimedia stars for the global stage, with a diverse set of revenue streams that rely little on using copyright to get royalties. He talked about the academies where they train artists -- picking those who are bilingual and who can act as well as sing. Basically, the K-Pop world expanded what it meant to be in the music business, changing the definition to suit the times... and it's working.

There is no reason to think that the South Korean music business is about to surpass the US's any day now, but there's no set rule that the most popular music has to come from the US forever. And those countries who encourage efforts that embrace the future and what the technology allows would seem to be in a much better position to go after the big opportunities.

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]]>getting-beat-at-their-own-gamehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121018/00360120743Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:07:32 PSTSwiss Government Says File Sharing Isn't A Big Deal; Artist Are Fine, Industry Should AdaptMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111205/12492616979/swiss-government-says-file-sharing-isnt-big-deal-artist-are-fine-industry-should-adapt.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111205/12492616979/swiss-government-says-file-sharing-isnt-big-deal-artist-are-fine-industry-should-adapt.shtmlhad not signed on yet, has put out a report from its executive branch, basically completely downplaying the issue of file sharing. The report notes, accurately, that consumers are still spending just as much on entertainment, and lots of it are going to artists. The only real problem seems to be a for a few big foreign gatekeepers who are getting cut out of the new revenue streams... and as far as the Swiss government is concerned, those companies should just learn to adapt. It specifically says that concerns about file sharing having a "negative impact on the Swiss cultural creativity are unfounded."

The report also rejects ideas like a three strikes plan or any sort of internet filtering. Three strikes is rejected for interfering with free speech rights, while filtering goes against privacy rules and might also degrade overall internet performance. Perhaps most interesting, the report rejects an idea for compulsory licensing -- something that has been gaining some support, but is a really bad idea. The Swiss report notes that existing media levies are incredibly unpopular with voters who know that the money isn't really going to artists, and separately they fear that it would get in the way of "international treaty obligations." I wonder if ACTA is a part of what they mean there.

Either way, you have to wonder if this stance means that Switzerland just bought itself a place on the US government's ridiculous Special 301 Report, which is basically the US government putting countries on a "naughty list," for infringement if enough rightsholders complain.

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]]>welcome-to-section-301https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111205/12492616979Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:40:24 PSTBelieving Legacy Gatekeepers Will Fail To Adapt Is Not The Same As Wanting Them To FailMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111111/03372116719/believing-legacy-gatekeepers-will-fail-to-adapt-is-not-same-as-wanting-them-to-fail.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111111/03372116719/believing-legacy-gatekeepers-will-fail-to-adapt-is-not-same-as-wanting-them-to-fail.shtml"Why I Hope the RIAA Succeeds." I got a lot of flack for it, because many people here seem to think that groups like the RIAA and MPAA should fail. I feel quite the opposite. I don't want them to fail at all. I think that they are failing, and I'm hoping that they wake up, pay heed to what we (and the wider public) are telling them, and adapt to a changing world full of opportunities. What I dislike is not the RIAA or the MPAA itself. But the strategies those groups employ, which I believe, quite strongly, are self-defeating and harmful to the public and the creative folks they claim to represent.

Still, many people assume that I hate these groups and want them to fail.

Author Barry Eisler, who has been in the news lately for turning down a half-a-million dollar deal from a traditional publisher to instead self-publish (and more recently, for signing a deal directly with Amazon, allowing him a sort of hybrid model between publisher and self-publishing), has been taking some similar heat lately as well. He wrote a guest post for Joe Konrath's blog, in which he discussed the nature of the legacy publishing business (short hand: "New York," just as people refer to "Hollywood" when discussing the legacy movie business), which he doesn't think is handling the digital transition particularly well -- especially compared to Amazon.

In response, many people accused him of hating "New York" and wanting those publishers to fail. In a followup post, Eisler does a nice job clarifying his position and explaining why wanting an institution (or group of them) to change and believing their current path is destined to fail, is not the same thing as wanting them to fail:

Now, if you ask me to bet on the likelihood that New York will successfully adapt to the advent of digital and the emergence of Amazon as a publisher, I would have to regretfully decline to bet very much. As I noted in my previous post, companies coddled by a lack of competition get flabby, and New York, which hasn't faced real competition in living memory, is now squaring off against a formidable competitor indeed. I don't think it's likely legacy publishers will be able to adapt and survive. And though I hope I'm wrong about that, my hope doesn't lead me to want to protect New York from competition, either.

Maybe I'm clarifying here more than is really necessary, but I've learned from recent experience how willing and even eager people can be to mischaracterize arguments they find threatening. So again: the fact that I'm predicting an outcome doesn't mean I'm hoping for it. I predict that one day I will be dead, but that doesn't render me particularly enamored of or eager for that outcome. Similarly, though I don't think New York's chances are good, come on, guys, I'm cheering you on. I want you to step up, not give up.

Indeed. That is very much the way I feel about the legacy music and movie businesses. I'm a huge fan of movies, music and books. I would love for all those industries to continue to be as successful as possible, but that requires adapting, and, like Barry, I just don't see many of those legacy players doing a very good job adapting. But that doesn't mean I want them to fail, or even dislike them. I just wish they'd stop trying to muck up the rest of the world while they attempt to figure all of this out.

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]]>important-distinctionshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111111/03372116719Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:31:00 PDTMainstream Press Account In Australia Makes The Case For Why 'Piracy' Is Not The ProblemMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111020/03551916430/mainstream-press-account-australia-makes-case-why-piracy-is-not-problem.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111020/03551916430/mainstream-press-account-australia-makes-case-why-piracy-is-not-problem.shtmlThe case for piracy, which sounds quite similar to many of the things we tend to talk about. It argues that the old school opinion that "piracy bad, copyright good" may not be particularly accurate -- and, in fact, it could be argued that "copyright owners" are in many ways their own worst enemies. If you think that sounds like the same thing we've been saying for over a decade, then you're correct -- but you probably haven't seen something like this show up in the mainstream press.

Much of the article focuses on how various industries abuse copyright to do anti-consumer activities, and how infringement is often the only way around it -- even for people who want to pay. The article also covers the recording industry's own suicidal tendencies.

Rather than give customers what they wanted publishers threw every toy they had out of the pram and hit the litigation button. One example saw the recording industry sue a 12-year old girl and won $2000. From her point of view she was simply using a free service on the internet that all her friends were using and discussing. One wonders how happy the recording industry was with its $2000 payout. Over the years industry bodies have spent far more money suing people than they recouped through the courts.

One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set.

It really is a fantastic piece. Kudos to ABC for running it, and to writer Nick Ross for publishing such an article.

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]]>a-wonderful-essayhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111020/03551916430Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:22:00 PSTNot All Porn Companies Suing File Sharers; Some Are Looking To Adapt And CompeteMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110224/07513913244/not-all-porn-companies-suing-file-sharers-some-are-looking-to-adapt-compete.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110224/07513913244/not-all-porn-companies-suing-file-sharers-some-are-looking-to-adapt-compete.shtmlengage with its community and see if it could adapt to the market, rather than fight its customers. The article includes a list of really good points by the company's spokesperson, Quentin Boyer:

You've had a lot of companies, both in mainstream and adult entertainment, who've been kind of stubborn on the question of access and convenience. They want people consuming their content the way the companies want it consumed. They want to monetize it the way they want to. About two years ago we began to see that as a losing battle.

In November, we actively began to engage user communities. Some people would identify them as pirate communities. Certainly, that's not the term we would use. For sure, there are content pirates among them too, but there are a lot of fans and a lot of potential customers. We started asking them 'What would make you more likely to purchase?' 'What do you want to see and what don't you want to see?'

A consumer who will come onto the Internet and buy adult content is someone who wants access and convenience. At the end of the day, lots of people provide the same kind of content. So, how do I differentiate myself as an adult-content producer? I give them better technology, better user experience, and better price point.

Part of our thinking is that you don't really benefit from bickering [or] by pointing fingers at the large user base that's out there. Setting aside for a second the question of whether some of them are ripping your content from a DVD and uploading it to the torrents, what do I have to gain by ostracizing this huge group of people, which is a mixed bag of people who might be willing to purchase and people who will never purchase?

I don't want to paint them all with the same brush. I think that's the mistake that some in mainstream entertainment have made, and I think that mistake's being replicated in the adult industry. I certainly understand the frustration that rights holders feel. We experience the same frustration. But at some point you have to be pragmatic and say, "OK piracy is a fact of life. It's been there for a long time. Now what?"

The important question is, can you make your appeal more effective? Can you make your marketing more effective and draw the people who are willing to purchase from you out from that population and get them to buy what you're selling?

Nice to see companies realize that suing is certainly not the only way to respond to a market that involves file sharing.

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]]>good-for-themhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110224/07513913244Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:40:41 PDTThe Perils Of Extrapolation: Who Knows What The Next Disruptive Innovation Will BeMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091018/2238436574.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091018/2238436574.shtml
Be adaptable
People who haven't built a company think that it's "the plan" or "the idea" that matters. That's almost never the case. Look at nearly every successful startup, and their business has little (if anything) to do with their initial plan. Google was going to sell search appliances as the core of its business. YouTube was supposed to be a dating service. Things change -- and the only thing that matters is how well your company adapts and executes. That's why it's silly to be too protective of a plan or idea or to focus on things like patents or NDAs. Most of that doesn't matter. Separately, projecting out more than a year may be a fun exercise, but is generally meaningless.

Why I ignore all "5 year plans": 5 years ago, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist, and Facebook was only for college kids

If you go back and look at plans or predictions from 2005, of where web content would be in 2010, it's unlikely that "micromessaging" like Twitter or online video like YouTube was considered quite as central. Certainly some folks thought video was on the cusp back then, but they expected it to come from professional offerings like BrightCove, rather than a user-generated setup like YouTube. It's always difficult to predict which innovation is actually going to hit -- and plenty of companies, especially in the media space, have had to change and adjust their strategies due to things like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook -- just like how a decade ago, companies quickly started adjusting their strategy to deal with Google. Five years from now, plenty of startups will be adjusting their strategy for some other service as well... And the only way you can do that is by being adaptable.

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]]>be-quick-to-adapthttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091018/2238436574Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:57:41 PDTWhy The Traditional News Media Is Becoming Less Relevant: They Didn't AdaptMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090921/0227066261.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090921/0227066261.shtmlhow the traditional news business lost its audience, I'm having trouble deciding which parts to quote. The whole thing is great, and is a must read. The basic thesis, though, is one you'll hear a lot around these parts. As the newspaper folks lash out at everyone, the real problem has been their own inability to adapt and change. They were built on a model where they were the sole place for a community to gather, but that community now has other options, and the news media has not kept up. Here's one snippet:

The truth is the Internet didn't steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason--many people don't feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.

Today, people expect to share information, not be fed it. They expect to be listened to when they have knowledge and raise questions. They want news that connects with their lives and interests. They want control over their information. And they want connection--they give their trust to those they engage with--people who talk with them, listen and maintain a relationship.

Trust is key. Many younger people don't look for news anymore because it comes to them. They simply assume their network of friends--those they trust--will tell them when something interesting or important happens and send them whatever their friends deem to be trustworthy sources, from articles, blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds, or videos.

Mainstream media are low on the trust scale for many and have been slow to reach out in a genuine way to engage people. Many news organizations think interaction is giving people buttons to push on Web sites or creating a walled space where people can "comment" on the news or post their own "iReports."

People aren't fooled by false interaction if they see that news staff don't read the comments or citizen reports, respond and pursue the best ideas and knowledge of the audience to improve their own reporting. Journalists can't make reporting more relevant to the public until we stop assuming that we know what people want and start listening to the audience.

Again, don't just read this snippet, read the whole thing. It goes on to talk about how other community sites have built trust, and have done it by really involving the community and empowering them. Anyone in the news business who doesn't understand this shouldn't be working in the news business much longer.

Because the news industry doesn't suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change.

While we have all been busy telling the newspaper institution what they should do differently we have missed one big point: Institutions are structured to precisely NOT do much of anything different.

I have to say, I don't find this convincing. While I think it's true that most newspapers won't do enough to change and will face more trouble because of it, claiming that they cannot change is questionable. Yes, it's quite difficult for companies in an industry being disrupted to make that shift, but there are cases where companies do make the shift. Intel switched from a memory business to a processor business. IBM has pretty much made the shift from a big tech company to a services company. Nokia used to make rubber boots. Companies with good and visionary management (and a healthy appetite for taking some big risks) can make, and have made, tectonic shifts. Yes, it's true that most don't do this, it does not mean that it's impossible. Claiming that they're structured not to make the change isn't true. They do have legacy issues, but it doesn't mean they can't make a big move to fix that.

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]]>sure-it-ishttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090917/0244106221Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:32:17 PDTSitePoint: Rather Than Freaking Out Over Piracy, We Decided To AdaptMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090813/1754355870.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090813/1754355870.shtmldo away with the passwords on the PDF versions of its books, noting that it seemed to only serve to piss off customers:

In the 18 months I have worked at SitePoint, barely a week has gone by where I have not received at least a couple of emails from customers questioning the logic behind our password protection policy. My response, based on the SitePoint philosophy, was always that we were taking an ethical (if largely symbolic) stance on the piracy issue. But how long could we maintain that line while simultaneously placing primacy on the customer experience, as all the while more and more requests to remove password protection poured in.

As a web development resource and learning centre, we know that we must embrace the state of flux -- not as a lofty ideal, but as a normative imperative. You can't claim to be all about the cutting edge when you're stubbornly clinging to old, outmoded processes -- especially when your own beloved customers are urging you to move on. And if we're not keeping pace with the constantly evolving face of web design and development, then we're neither a resource nor a learning centre -- we're a museum.

Kudos to another company recognizing that pissing off your best customers is hardly a way to run a business.

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]]>good-for-themhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090813/1754355870Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:48:45 PDTIndie Record Shops Learning To AdaptMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090727/0352095675.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090727/0352095675.shtmlmore of a destination, rather than a "record store." And over the years, we've seen more and more and more stories of smaller record stores learning to adapt.

The latest, sent in by Dave W looks at a bunch of shops in the UK that appear to have realized that they need to completely change -- including one that's really focused on being a destination for people to hang out and buy coffee... while hearing music (often live music) and then selling only special physical goods: limited edition box sets and vinyl. And, apparently for some of these shops, business is better than before. Despite the disappearance of regular CD sales, they've more than made it up selling other music-related goods. It's about recognizing that people still do want physical goods, but they view it as a souvenir, to show support for the musicians, rather than buying "the music" itself. The music, to them, is free. But that doesn't mean they won't pay for goods of value. And retailers can absolutely support that new market as well.